


our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure

by deathrae



Series: i've been through hell but i'm still standing [6]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Multi, exploration of trauma, implied wayfinder OT3, ptsd study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 19:23:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5978356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathrae/pseuds/deathrae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because sometimes teenagers go into hell and come home, then go back and come home again.</p><p>And sometimes it never seems to end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure

Sora’s schedule was simple, but grueling, though his friends only knew a fraction of what he’d taken on.

Weight training and running in the morning. Spells before and after lunch. Sparring in the afternoon. History in the evening. Free periods only occasionally before bed or when one of the others needed a change of pace and he lost a sparring partner or a teacher.

Then, when it’d gotten dark, he would crawl into bed beside Kairi and allow himself to doze, and with the long patience of a boy who’d slept for a year and searched for longer, he would wait for Riku to come to bed after he’d exhausted himself studying.

One of these days, he told himself, he’d talk to the man, figure out what was bothering him.

When Riku had finally come back to their room, shrugged out of his vest and dumped his shoes somewhere and, if he remembered, changed into a pair of sweats, Sora would count out his own breaths, slow and even and pretending to be asleep, and wait. Wait until the other boy’s shaky, uneven breathing leveled out to a very soft snore that somehow, if only because it was _Riku_ , managed to sound just vaguely anxious.

Then he’d wriggle out from under Kairi’s sprawled arm, leap over the bed and glide to a silent stop, and then let himself quietly out into the castle.

He patrolled the castle for an hour, checking Terra’s room, ticking off Terra and Aqua from his checklist. For a while he found Ven wandering the lower level looking like a very tired puppy, his eyes red from rubbing and his hair fluffed from the all-too-brief affair with his pillow. Later, when Terra took Ven in, it was easier, since he could count them all at once.

Only when he was sure the older set were ensconced in Terra’s room, or, at the very least, only wandering harmlessly downstairs, only _then_ would he quietly leave and patrol the outer perimeter of the castle grounds, the yards, the walkways. The stars shone down and glinted off his keyblade as he searched the nooks and crannies and watched meteor showers in the distant sky.

Every night he searched, exhausted but too wound up to sleep.

Every night he looked for pockets of shadow that were too black, too shiny.

Every night he looked for eyes, yellow and gleaming from the darkness or glinting from inside a deep hood.

Every morning, he returned to the castle as dawn loomed bright at the horizon, finally satisfied, for now, that there was nothing prowling closer to devour his friends and shatter his fragile peace.

He would silently let himself back into the room he shared with his friends, dutifully remind himself to take his armor back off, and crawl up beside Kairi, slotting himself into the gap between her shoulder and the wall as if he’d never been missing.

His dreams were full of black and white. Leather and marble. The red of blood and hunger, the gold of evil and sinister darkness. He dreamed of dreams and memories and chains. He dreamed of waking up and finding that it was all reset again.

He dreamed that he woke up and the castle was empty, again. That his heart was full with halves of other people. Again.

That there was more work to do. That he’d never be truly finished.

Every morning he woke before Kairi with a jolt, with an echo ringing in his ears—the clicking sound of Shadows’ claws ticking against his window.

It would never be over.

Not really.

 

Once Terra convinced Ven to sleep in his room, patrols made Sora feel like the castle was emptier than ever. With the older ones asleep and his friends in bed, there was no one left to pass by him in the halls, no one to wave tiredly at him or offer a faint, distant smile.

He didn’t expect to feel so lonely.

Two weeks after that change, like clockwork, he reached Terra’s room and opened the door, silently, a bit of magic on the hinges to be sure. Ven wasn’t in bed where he was supposed to be, sandwiched between Terra and Aqua like a child after a nightmare, and Sora frowned, scanning the room. Ven was sitting at Terra’s desk, holding his wayfinder in his hands and studying it, and when the door opened he looked up like he’d been waiting for Sora’s arrival.

The air between them was quiet, but heavy.

Ven got up, shooed him with a hand, and followed him into the corridor.

Sora withdrew and waited until Ven stepped out and shut the door.

“It’s okay,” Ven said.

Sora nodded, but for once he wasn’t sure what to say. It was different now, talking with Ven. It took more effort, more thought. Before they’d been so much a part of each other that communication, when they actually could, was more effortless than breathing.

_Don’t be afraid. You are the one that will open the door._

First words. Last words.

All told it was just... strange, hearing Ven’s voice now.

Ven gave him a smile that was Ven until his teeth flashed in a grin that was not quite the right size for his face, and then it was all Roxas, Roxas in the crinkling of his eyes, Roxas at the corner of his lips when it lifted and pulled to form a sly smile. Ven set a hand on Sora’s shoulder. Squeezed. Shook him gently.

“You don’t have to do it all yourself, you know,” he said.

Sora thought it was sort of unfair that he struggled to talk to Ven while Ven clearly had no problem transitioning from heart-sharing to sharing words with mouths. What a cheater.

“I know,” Sora said, though it came out a little mechanically, out of obligation rather than actually agreeing.

Ven smiled like he understood what Sora wasn’t saying and patted his shoulder gently, then cuffed his ear like Terra would and ruffled his hair.

“You always push yourself too hard,” he said, and reached for the door again to go back to bed. “Just be careful.”

“Yeah,” Sora said, but the word felt hollow and sounded worse.

The door shutting sounded terribly final.

He knew Ven was right. He pushed too hard, worked too much. Without Donald and Goofy to hold him back just a little and keep him steady he’d probably have worked himself to death in the Chasm in Radiant Garden. Or the World That Never Was. Or Castle Oblivion. Or the Underworld. Or Agrabah. Or—

Well. Anyway.

His reflexes never suffered. His timing was always perfect. He still couldn’t beat Ven at sparring, but that was just because of how in sync they were.

He beat Riku every one in three, though Terra still gave him a run for his money. He was close to evenly matched with Aqua for swordplay but Aqua beat him every time on magic.

No matter how exhausted he was, he was still in fighting form, and that was enough.

 

After they switched up the sleeping arrangements so that Riku slept in the middle, it was a lot harder to leave in the middle of the night. His schedule was thrown out of whack, just from waiting an extra hour and spending an extra fifteen minutes wiggling out from beside Riku to make sure he never woke him.

That disruption, it turned out, was enough to completely wreck his system.

He fell asleep post-patrol still in his armor.

He woke up late and fell asleep at the breakfast table, and would’ve dunked his face into his oatmeal if Riku hadn’t yanked him back by the shirt.

He couldn’t focus during Aqua’s lesson and nearly set a bookcase on fire.

Terra flipped him on his back in a record four-point-five seconds, such that Sora spent the next two minutes all but hallucinating that he was back in the Graveyard with the Lingering Will and flatly _refusing_ to go anywhere near Terra, to Ven and Riku’s utter confusion.

He jolted so hard when Kairi walked up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder that he bashed his nose into a wall and had to have Kairi set it and Cure it for him, and even then for an hour he couldn’t breathe without smelling his own blood.

In short, he was a wreck.

Riku dragged him to bed. Actually physically dragged him from the dinner table to his room, took off his shoes and his coat, and pushed him into bed. When Sora started to sit up again Riku stripped down too and crawled in next to him, pulling a grumpy Sora to his chest and snuggling into the pillows.

“What are you doing?” Sora asked.

“Sleeping, obviously.”

“It’s not even dark!”

“Do you want me to pull the curtain?”

“No I just—Riku come on, this is stupid. Get off me. I need to study.”

Riku pulled him in tighter and tugged the quilt up over them with his other hand. “You don’t need to a damn thing, Sora. I’m a Master, I know when you should train and when you should _stop_ , and you look ready to collapse.”

Sora seethed, the fact that Riku had pulled rank on him chafing at his already raw nerves. “You know I’m practically a Master too, that’s not fair. And I just can’t. I can’t rest now, there’s—”

Riku propped himself up on an elbow, hair fluffing out from behind his ears, and looked down at him. “There’s what?”

Sora flicked his eyes away and back, focused more on the pale, unmarked skin of Riku’s shoulder than his face. “Nothing, I just—”

“It’s not nothing or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But if you say ‘there’s work to be done,’ I swear I’m gonna knock your stupid ass out and make you sleep that way. When I said I was afraid of you and Kairi never waking up again this was _not_ the way to fix it.”

“Riku—”

“No, Sora, I’m serious.”

Sora hissed out a breath.

“Sora, please.” There was a hollowness in Riku’s voice that made his chest ache. “Look at me.”

He looked.

Riku’s face was different from how Sora remembered it. There were lines where they didn’t belong, creases at the corner of his eyes and the edges of his mouth. There was a shadow in Riku’s eyes like a reflection of his heart. Riku set a hand, scarred with darkness but smooth to the touch, against Sora’s chest, and held him down against the bed so he wouldn’t move, his eyes searching Sora’s and Sora’s searching his in turn.

“Sora.”

Sora took a deep breath, readying a thousand counter-arguments.

“You’re scaring me.”

Riku’s voice cracked and Sora’s resolve fractured into shards and his breath came out in a rush, his lungs feeling just as empty as the rest of him.

“You’re scaring all of us. I know you’re getting up in the middle of the night. Kairi’s known you haven’t been sleeping for _months_ , probably even before we all started sharing a room. I know you get up, and I know you’re gone for hours. Where are you going?”

Sora couldn’t look him in the eye. “Just around, y’know.”

“Around?”

“I patrol the castle.”

“That shouldn’t take five hours a night.”

“And the grounds.” Riku narrowed his eyes, clearly not satisfied. “And... the yards. And the lake.” Riku stared, waiting. “And... the bridges, if it isn’t morning yet.”

Riku sighed heavily.

“ _Why?_ ”

Sora leaned his head back into the pillow and stared at the ceiling like he expected to find the answer written there. Somewhere in the distance birds called to each other, and the window was lit up orange with the distant light of sunset.

_Do you know why the sun sets red?_

His heart ached.

“I can’t stop,” he said softly. “I know that... that it’s over. I do. But every time I stop, it always comes back.”

“Sora—”

“No, Riku, it’s true. When I take a break, when I’m gone for a few days, a few months, a year. When I come back, it’s always gone to shit again.”

For once Riku didn’t say anything.

“I can’t stop. I can’t take a break, I can’t just... just go on vacation. Maybe the Keyblade _didn’t_ choose me but I’m the one who got stuck with cleanup. Every world is the same way. It never stays saved. There’s always more Heartless. More Nobodies. More darkness. Even when it isn’t Xehanort. There’s always more.”

Riku lay down next to him and curled an arm around him, quiet.

“I keep feeling like it has to be me. I’ve got all of you around me, I know that, but... in the end it always seems to be me.”

Riku hummed like he was thinking and tucked silver hair behind his ear.

“Sora.”

“Mm.” Against his better judgement, the warmth of his bed and the softening light was tugging him away from wakefulness.

“For now, get some sleep. If something goes wrong, I’ll wake you.”

Behind his eyelids Sora saw the crushing waves of the sea and a shattered raft and a ball of darkness big enough to consume an island.

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

 

In the morning Kairi and Riku shared whispered ideas and mumbled to each other and Kairi ran her fingers over Sora’s where his arm was tucked over Riku’s waist and under his elbow.

Aqua taught Sora a new spell, an alarm she was all too practiced casting.

Terra taught him how to use his keyblade to hook around an unsuspecting ankle and yank sideways to tug a combatant off-course mid-flight, a move he developed to fight Ven, just before the Mark of Mastery. Which Ven never learned, never had reason to show Sora.

Kairi poked at his ear during dinner to make him laugh and Riku stopped studying for the night when it wasn’t even dusk. They played card games and joked about building a tiny raft for the tiny lake on the castle grounds.

It got dark, slowly, bit by bit, the light from the sun edging toward the horizon until all that was left was stars.

Kairi got up, and Sora did too, about to take off his coat for bed.

“Keep that,” Riku said, with a sly little smile.

“Huh?”

“Come on, ya lazy bum,” Kairi said with a grin, and swept off into the corridor and down the hall, drawing her keyblade and resting it against her shoulder. Riku pulled his and followed her, and Sora trailed after them both, confused.

They wandered the hallways and the stairwells, and eventually Sora took the lead, insisting they were on an incredibly inefficient path. He led them through the kitchens and up to the attic, to the library, the study, and past the armory. Down past Terra’s room, with a quick spell and an opened door to check.

All three were where they should be, and Sora nodded, satisfied.

He looked to his friends. Kairi waved him on, and Riku dipped his head, politely, a silent _well, let’s go then_.

Sora grinned and led them through the front doors.

Outside he finally drew his keyblade and led them on his well-trodden circuit of the grounds. He was thorough, but quick, and they stalked beside him, silent and watchful. Kairi spooked at a rustling in a bush that turned out to just be a raccoon, but he patted her on the shoulder, thankful for her reflexes all the same.

Riku glared into every pocket of darkness, sniffing judiciously and nodding every time he decided the air was clear. Sora’s smile betrayed his gratitude in a way he didn’t think words ever could have.

They finished the perimeter in record time.

Sora glanced around, unsure if they should circle again. Maybe go further out?

Riku set a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently to pull his focus.

“Let’s go on to bed, Sora,” Riku said.

Sora frowned, thinking.

“This time all three of us checked,” Kairi said, and her voice was soft, but no less powerful. “And we did good, right?”

Sora nodded, suddenly very afraid that she would still think she wasn’t as good as they were. “Yeah! There’s definitely nothing out here tonight.”

“Good. Let’s go then,” Riku said, grinning, and he tugged Sora close so that their shoulders bumped together. “Don’t forget. Even the ones who beat one of us once never beat us all together.”

Sora thought about that, about his friends, about the stars overhead.

— _Don’t be afraid_.—

After all, he hadn’t been alone then, and he wouldn’t be alone now.

“Yeah,” he said, and pulled his friends in close, his arms looped around their shoulders. “Let’s get some sleep!”

“But not too much,” Riku said, maybe a little too quickly. “No more one-year naps.”

Sora laughed, and Kairi grinned cheekily at them both.

“No way! There’s too much stuff I wanna learn to sleep that long.” Sora grinned and ran back toward the castle doors, turning to point at his friends. “But for now, work can wait. Let’s go!”

 

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to all of you who've stuck with me on this crazy ride. I read all your comments and I'm super grateful for all of you.
> 
> Unless I come up with a strong idea for one more, this is the last installment in this series. Thank you, everybody!


End file.
